Suitability criteria answer a single question: is this supplier fundamentally capable of performing the contract tendered? They relate to the company, not to its bid. What is typically examined is technical capability through comparable references, the professional qualification of the proposed individuals, financial capability, and compliance with statutory obligations such as social insurance and tax.
The decisive difference from award criteria
The most important insight for suppliers is the separation of suitability and award. Suitability criteria are a threshold: met or not met. A firm that does not meet them is out, before its bid is even looked at substantively. Award criteria, by contrast, are an assessment: they compare the admitted bids against one another, typically weighting price and quality. An outstanding bid saves nobody who has not evidenced suitability. The separation is prescribed in law and serves the principle of equal treatment — mixing them, by scoring suitability aspects again as an award criterion, is in principle not permitted.
What is typically required
The specific criteria are set by the awarding body per procedure, but the categories recur. References for comparable contracts, usually with requirements on type, volume and period. Details of the proposed key personnel with qualification and role experience. Evidence of financial standing. Confirmations on social insurance, tax and, on labour-intensive services, compliance with the applicable working and pay conditions. Depending on contract type, certifications, insurance evidence or sector-specific licences are added.
Why bids fail here
The most common ground of exclusion is not lack of capability but the inability to evidence capability that exists. A company has the right reference, but it is scattered across project folders and not found before the deadline. Evidence exists but has expired. A confirmation sits with a third party and was requested too late. These errors arise from lack of lead time, not lack of qualification — and they are why preparing the body of evidence matters more economically than the wording of the bid.
Proportionality of the criteria
Suitability criteria must relate objectively to the contract and must not go beyond what performing it requires. Excessive requirements — references at a scale far above the contract tendered — restrict competition unnecessarily and may be challengeable. It is therefore worth suppliers not reflexively accepting criteria as unreachable but checking whether they are proportionate to the contract.
The body of evidence as infrastructure
Because the categories recur across procedures, a structured body of evidence pays off. References with type, volume, client and year. Personnel files with roles, project periods and certificates. Confirmations with issue dates, so currency stays visible. Building and maintaining that set once considerably reduces the effort of every further submission — entry is expensive once, cheap thereafter.
The practical order of work
A clear order of work follows. First extract the suitability criteria from the documents and hold them against your own body of evidence. Only once suitability is demonstrably provable is the effort of costing and bid writing worthwhile. That order sounds obvious but is routinely reversed — with the result that capacity flows into bids that fail at the first stage.